In Jon Wright’s latest creature feature, Unwelcome, the monsters are the lesser of two evils. But unlike Wright’s 2012’s Irish monster flick, Grabbers, which involved townsfolk staying drunk to make themselves toxic to alcohol-averse, bloodthirsty tentacle-balls invading from the sky, there isn’t an attempt at horror-comedy here. Wright and co-writer Mark Stay instead expose their protagonists to all manner of cruelty, violence and dread dished out by fellow humans. And yet, with goofy-looking goblin creatures eventually scurrying about, it’s also not a particular scary film, but rather one that yields unpleasant imagery and one-dimensional villains behaving badly.
Despite inheriting a house in the Irish countryside, the young, expecting British couple at the core of the film faces far more malice from people they encounter than they do from the specter of forest-dwelling wee folk, “not quite leprechauns” that are instead known as “far darrig” or simply “redcaps.” Having jumped at the chance to escape their dangerous London neighborhood where they incurred the trauma of a home invasion from local hoodlums—and on the night they were celebrating a positive pregnancy test, no less—Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) and Jamie (Douglas Booth) eventually will find themselves once again tormented by cruel aggressors.
As storybook as their new Irish estate first seems, there are some downsides. Local barkeep Maeve (Niamh Cusack) warns that the redcaps must be offered a daily blood sacrifice—at least a bit of liver or other organ meat—to keep them at bay, and she relates a story about Jamie’s aunt, the previous owner, losing a daughter as a bargain gone wrong with the redcaps. We see shadows and hear rustling from time to time, but for over half the film the wee creatures are wisely kept in the margins. Once they appear onscreen, these nasty little goblins appear rather cartoonish, especially juxtaposed by a violent family of contract workers who terrorize Maya and Jamie, and who act as the film’s true villains.
The gaping hole in the house’s roof is such an urgent need that, when more reputable workers are all booked up, Maya and Jamie go with rough-and-tumble Whelan family to do the job. With a patriarch that insists everyone, clients included, call him “Daddy” (Colm Meaney), the Whelans are awful people who erect a little scaffolding but otherwise never even both to cover the hole, instead spending their time stealing from the couple and defiling their home in various ways before threatening and then committing violence against them. Whether it’s the crass Aisling (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), the shady Killian (Chris Walley), the simple, ogre-like Eoin (Kristian Nairn) or the abusive Daddy, the Whelans are aggressively abhorrent characters and they’re also the weak link in this story, their malevolence more unrealistic than the bloodthirsty goblins that inhabit the stone shrine found in the nearby wood.
Some levity would go a long way in Unwelcome but the onslaught of cruelty and violence doesn’t allow for it. There is little here in the romping spirit of Grabbers, or in the comedic undercurrent of Gremlins, a film that Unwelcome is being widely compared to and to which it clearly pays some homage. The film also doesn’t tip over into outright terror, as one might find in even more deranged families like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Sawyer clan. An over-the-top, unearned ending packs a lot of redcap lore into a short sequence, leaving the film feeling tonally uneven with gritty home-invasion violence on the one hand and kooky creatures taken far too seriously on the other.
Photo courtesy of Well Go USA
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